long-range-scan/README.md

Long Range Scan

A browser recreation of the 1971 starship patrol game — the one you played on a printing terminal, hunting through sixty-four quadrants by reading three digits at a time.

It is called Long Range Scan rather than the name you are thinking of, and NOTICE.md explains why at length. The short version: the rules are free to rebuild and the trademarks are not, so the mechanics are exact and the vocabulary is ours. The same goes for the music -- it is the idiom, written from scratch, not the theme.

It ships in two skins over one game. 1971 is the machine as it was: a printing terminal, black ink on fanfold paper, the print head hammering out one character at a time and nothing on screen you have not read. Remaster is the same patrol with the sensors drawn -- a bridge console with the ship down one side, a cel-shaded grid in the middle and the log down the other. The rules never differ between them, and neither does a single word the machine says. Switch any time with the button under the frame.

React + TypeScript + Vite, and not one binary asset: every mark on the sensors is SVG generated from the game state, and every note is generated by a small synth on the Web Audio API.

Playing

npm install
npm run dev

The leaderboard is a separate service; run games-scores alongside this if you want one, or do not, and the board will say so rather than break.

You dial in rather than switch on, because in 1971 the game was not on your machine — it was on somebody else's, down a telephone line.

One to four captains share the keyboard, hot-seat style. A turn is one whole patrol rather than one command: you fly yours until the raiders are gone or something ends you, and only then does the next captain sit down. Each gets their own galaxy, dealt off the same seed.

• The galaxy is eight by eight quadrants, each of eight by eight sectors. A long range scan reads three digits per quadrant — raiders, starbases, stars — so 205 is two raiders, no base and five stars. Reading those is the whole game.
• Courses run 1 to 9 anticlockwise: 1 along the row, 3 up, 5 back, 7 down, and 9 is 1 again so that 8.5 has somewhere to go. Warp 1 is eight sectors.
• 3000 units of energy and ten torpedoes. Energy moves you, fires the beams, and fills the shields; it is all one pool, and that is the entire economy of the game.
• Eight devices can break when you are hit. Damage control only works while you fly, which is why a hurt ship has to keep moving.
• Moor beside a starbase and you are full again — tanks, racks, and a day of repairs. There are rarely more than three or four in a galaxy.
• A raider hits harder the closer it is, and spends itself doing it. Sit at range and you take less and give less. Close in and it is settled either way in two exchanges.
• A torpedo goes where it is pointed and nowhere else. A star swallows it. So does your own starbase, and that ends the patrol in the worst way there is.
• The clock is the real opponent. Twenty-five to thirty-five days, and sixty-four quadrants to look in.

High scores

One board, shared by everybody. Ending a session posts every captain in the party, and the top 50 comes back ranked best first: raiders destroyed, then whole days left on the orders, then torpedoes still in the racks. Days are whole on the board and shown to a tenth in the game — the service's ranked columns are integers, and a tie-break finer than a day would be measuring the dice rather than the captain.

There is no way to clear it. A captain leaves the list only by being pushed off the bottom by a better one.

What is not built yet

• The remaster. The 1971 skin is the machine as it was: paper, ink, and a print head. The cel-shaded tactical view is next, and everything is already shaped for it — every colour is a token, the transcript is structured data rather than strings on a page, and Line.kind is what the map will read.
• Sound. The synth arrives with the remaster. The dial-up boot in screens.tsx is already written to a schedule so it can be played rather than only printed.
• Registration on the shared board. games-scores needs one file for scan before anything posts; until then the game plays fine and the board says it is not answering.

Layout

Path	What is in it
src/game/constants.ts	every number, and every word the machine says
src/game/galaxy.ts	the compass, the scatter, laying out a quadrant
src/game/engine.ts	the rules: warp, beams, torpedoes, being shot at
src/game/aim.ts	turning a click into a course and a warp factor
src/game/reducer.ts	phases, and the only place a turn changes hands
src/audio/	the synth, and the two bands written for it
src/components/	the paper, the bridge, the console, and the screens either side

npm test proves the parts that are arithmetic rather than judgement: that the compass closes, that a scattered galaxy is always worth flying, that a warp stops at the rim and short of anything in the way, that every way a patrol can end, ends it, that every click lands where it was aimed, and that every note in every tune is one the synth can find.